New horizon for Jamaican books
Publishing opportunities said to be opening up in China
Published:Sunday | December 15, 2024 | 12:07 AM
The rapid growth of the middle class in China and their search for experiences outside of their country has presented opportunities for international writers, including Jamaicans, to break into that massive market.
This is the view of Alicia Liu, founder and CEO of Singing Grass Communications, a business consultancy advising on access and development strategies for the Chinese market.
Liu says the publishing industry in China was worth about 93.2 billion pounds sterling in 2023, or about nine times that of the United Kingdom. She says although Chinese is the dominant language, the country is very outward-looking.
“In China, we’re looking at 22 per cent of the books that are published in Chinese are actually translated titles. We are talking about not just English language books, but a variety of books coming from France, Japan, Germany, South America and Eastern Europe. It’s a new era ... where people are very curious about what’s happening outside China,” said Liu.
Speaking, from her base in the United Kingdom, at the Jamaica Book Festival held in Kingston last week, Liu said one-third of all students in China are learning English, and that most books are published electronically, with physical copies making up only 20 per cent of the books published.
Of note is that the Chinese are interested in educational and non-fiction books rather than fiction titles, Liu said.
However, she noted that some fictional books do extremely well in the vast Chinese market, one example being One Hundred Years of Solitude, a 1967 novel by Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, which has sold more than 10 million copies in China over the past decade.
“The market in China is huge, and just because a book is from a smaller country it doesn’t mean they’re not interested. It’s about finding the right title and also making contacts with Chinese publishers, because it’s quite a diverse market and different regions have different tastes as well,” Liu said.
The consultant listed Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou as the three cities to consider in trying to break into the Chinese market, and suggested working with local and state-controlled publishers and social media influences on the Chinese-owned platform TikTok in promoting Jamaican books and educational material.
Statistics about the size and value of the book industry in Jamaica are uncertain and disputed. However, a report prepared in 2021 by consulting firm Nordicity for the Jamaica Business Development Corporation and the British Council stated that Jamaica’s CCI, or cultural and creative industry, is estimated to contribute 5.2 per cent of GDP, or economic output, generating revenues of $2.2 billion annually and accounting for three per cent of total employment.
In a survey conducted by Nordicity with 550 CCI stakeholders, seven per cent said they worked in literature and publishing.
According to the study, in 2013 the global visual arts, music, and books CCI sectors employed the most people, while the television, visual arts, and newspaper/magazine sectors recorded the highest revenues.
The economic value of the book publishing industry in Jamaica has been recognised since the beginning of the millennium in academia and independent research projects in the Caribbean. Jamaica’s book publishing industry is an exporter. In 2017, Barbados was the top destination for Jamaica’s printed books, amounting to $5.9 million that year. Past data has suggested there is an imbalance between the value of books imported into the Caribbean versus the value of those exported.